Bread Baking: Crispy Seedy Breadsticks Recipe

I love festive winter dinners, but they tend to be full of comfort food: everything's rich, smooth, and creamy. Sometimes there's a salad leading the way, but once you hit the main dish, there's not a lot of crunch. Breadsticks to the rescue. These are a perfect companion to the dinner rolls in the bread basket, and they'd be welcome with the appetizers as well.

As much as I love a fluffy dinner roll, there's so much other food served for holiday meals that a roll seems like a lot of food to commit to. Breadsticks are smaller—almost just a nibble—so it's easy to make room on the plate for one. Or two.

Not only are these breadsticks crisp, they're filled with seeds that add even more texture. And since these are dry crispy breadsticks, you can make them ahead of time and they'll last for a long time. No need to worry about getting them eaten with the rest of the leftovers, these can wait for you to get around to them.

When I make breadsticks, usually I don't bother trimming the edges of the dough before I cut the sticks, which means the ends of the breadsticks are always a little knobby looking. This time I decided to be neater about it, but it's up to you if you're going for holiday-polished or something more rustic.

These bake at a low temperature for a long time, so they dry out before they brown. The slow baking also eliminates the need to rearrange them much during baking.

*Note: I used one teaspoon each of toasted sesame seeds, brown sesame seeds, black sesame seeds, nigella seeds, poppy seeds, and white poppy seeds. Use any combination of your favorites.

About the author: Donna Currie has been cooking for fun and writing for pay since the days when typewritten articles traveled by snail mail. When she combined those talents in a food column for a newspaper in her area, she realized that writing about food is almost as much fun as eating. She launched the blog Cookistry and has now joined the Serious Eats team with a weekly column about baking.

Yield:Makes 4 dozen breadsticks

Active time:50 minutes

Total time:3 hours

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups lukewarm water

2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast

13 1/2 ounces (about 2 1/2 cups) bread flour

1/4 cup instant mashed potatos

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons seeds (see note above)

1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions

1.

Combine the water, yeast, and roughly 1/3 of the flour in the bowl of your stand mixer. Stir to combine, and set aside until it is bubbly, about 10 minutes. Add the remaining flour and the instant potatoes, and knead with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and elastic. Add the salt, oil, and seeds, and continue kneading until the seeds are well distributed. Form the dough into a ball and drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Return it to the bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and set aside until it has doubled in size, about an hour. Flour your work surface and have 3 baking sheets ready. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.

2.

Turn the dough out onto your work surface and knead by hand very briefly, then form it into a rough square. Roll it to approximately 11 x 20 inches. With a pastry cutter or pizza cutter (or a knife, but a rolling cutter is easier) trim the edges so they're straight. You'll use those scraps as well. After trimming, my rectangle of dough was about 9 x 18 inches. Cut the dough into 9-inch long strips, about the thickness of a pencil, and place them on baking sheets, leaving a little room between each so they can expand a little during baking. You will need about 3 baking sheets to fit them all. You can twist the breadsticks, or leave them straight. When you're done with all of the uniformly-shaped breadsticks, cut the scraps as well, combining smaller pieces if needed.

3.

Bake at 275 degrees for one hour, rotating the pans and moving them to different racks as needed for even cooking. After an hour, they should be dry and crisp; a sample should snap in half and be completely dry in the center. If they haven't browned to your liking, raise the heat to 325 and bake for another 4-7 minutes, watching carefully to make sure they don't over-brown.

4.

Let the breadsticks cool completely on racks, then leave them out for several hours or overnight before you store them in any sort of closed container—any residual moisture can make them soft. Alternatively, store cooled breadsticks in bakery bags that "breathe," so there's no chance of dampness.

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